Hiroshi Ishii from MIT Media Labs seems to be working on a project called InFORM 2.5D. This futuristic-project looks like it has been adopted from some sci-fi movie. The project includes two tables , where one is used as a scanner and the other is used to replicate the same movement in 2.5D using columns.

Well of course you wouldn’t see such a thing being used at home or in an office in the near future. The name includes “2.5D” because the copy of the image replicated is not in 3-D dimensions . You can see the top and sides of the columns working together to come up with a near identical shape, while you can’t see what’s beneath it because that’s where all the mechanisms for making the whole project possible are.

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Of course using the columns makes the shape look a little off but, again this is just a prototype and a self made project, using more sticks instead of the columns would have made an almost identical replica of the image presented under the scanning table. But who knows (except Hiroshi and his team of course) what changes and troubles that would have caused during the development. According to the official PDF file for the project, the research team believes that shapechanging interfaces will become increasingly available in the future, and the team tries to push towards creating a vocabulary and design space for more general-purpose interaction for shape displays, including rendering of both content and UI elements. Such projects open up even more ideas maybe for us gamers. This is just one of the projects that make us think that all the tech and sci-fi stuff we see in movies could become a possibility soon. Considering the word soon, there are already tons of projects going on like the Iron-Man suit, flexible keyboards, transparent helmets (showcased recently), artificial gravity etc. We can only wait and hope such things become mass produced and implemented in todays games.